S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 9 Shai Tubali akar 1986, 280), whereas in this dialogue he mentions that in the Buddha’s case, after fifty years there were two, Sariputta and Moggallana, who accomplished the ultimate state (Jayakar 1986, 387). This implies that well-paved paths may lead to the sacred, and more successfully than Krishnamurti’s anti-path. Second, his statement that he himself did not need to go through “all these disciplines” (Jayakar 1986, 391) certainly does not prove that outside of Krishnamurti’s individual case, paths leading to the sacred are inherently wrong. Krishnamurti’s highly subjective conclusion may lead us to infer that his notion of religion is rooted in his personal transformational experience, and that it should be classified accordingly, within the framework set by Ninian Smart’s six elements of religious traditions, as a sharing rather than an actual teaching (Rodrigues 2001, 202). While the claims that Krishnamurti makes about the ineffectiveness of all paths are questionable, his main argument in this dialogue, which is also his justification of the methodless method of total denial, is more substantial. Krishnamurti asserts that there is an as-yet-unattempted possibility – a chapter that “has not been studied so far” (Jayakar 1986, 391) – in the field of mystical pursuit. To grasp this possibility, it should be noted that for Krishnamurti, human thought is not limited to the individual brain’s mental creation and image-making activity, since everyone’s brains are also products and storehouses of the accumulated experience and knowledge of humanity as a whole (Kumar 2015, 86). This leads the mystic to conclude that “because my mind is the human mind which has experimented with all that and yet has not come upon this benediction… I won’t touch all that” (Jayakar 1986, 387). His method of total negation is therefore rooted in the logic that all optional pathways of religious search, which appear to be outside the seeker, already exist in their brain, and so there is no need to take these paths that, at least unconsciously, have already been taken. This is also the one factor that he believes changes the whole mind, since now, by negating all forms of human search, the mind can attain the very state it has sought for countless millennia. Krishnamurti’s innovation is his proposition that even the noblest traditions of mystical transcendence are now registered as knowledge within the brain and, as such, that repeating their practices can only perpetuate the mind’s conditioning. Nonetheless, this unprecedented form of renunciation that Krishnamurti offers to his discussants seems highly unrealistic in light of its prerequisite that one should already be established in a state of unity consciousness. After all, how many people can proclaim, as Krishnamurti does in this dialogue, that “I am the saint; I am the monk; I am the man who says, I will fast, I will torture myself physically, I will deny all sex…” (Jayakar 1986, 387)? Once again, we may wonder whether Krishnamurti’s fiery meditation is, in effect, an inspiring sharing of his exceptional subjective reality, which was already remarkable in his childhood and which was spontaneously characterized by this mode of all-inclusive negation. Nonetheless, Krishnamurti is adamant that this “act of total denial” can be shown and shared, and that it is the lack of total denial that keeps the door closed (Jayakar 1986, 389). Unlike many other dialogues, in which Krishnamurti repudiates answers suggested by discussants, here he plays a double role in that he is mostly the one raising the answers that he himself quickly rejects. After negating the path of the ascetic and its well-known practices of renunciation, celibacy, fasting, and solitude, he questions whether it is immense energy that opens the door, but considering the fact that missionaries possess great passion, he abandons this option (Jayakar 1986, 387). Similarly, it is not Krishnamurti’s own passion and presence that can bring the student any closer to the sacred (Jayakar 1986, 387). In fact, one of the climactic moments in this dialogue is when the teacher demonstrates how he includes in his negation even his own teaching of self-knowledge, regarding it as yet another path that leads nowhere (Jayakar 1986, 388, 389). But Krishnamurti does not stop at negating religious forms of search: he goes on to deny all the experiments done by humans in the hope of attaining this blessedness, such as alcohol, sex, and drugs, but also study and knowledge (Jayakar 1986, 390). And when the main discussant, Narayan, is overwhelmed by the magnitude of this method, commenting that the “lack of strength of the body and the mind creeps in,” the teacher’s reply is: “I am eighty-five and I say, you have to deny” (Jayakar 1986, 390). It is not that Krishnamurti negates the various paths as a form of systematic skepticism. In his words, this is not a “blind denial… the denial has tremendous reason, logic behind it” (Jayakar 1986, 389). He is very far from negators such as the sixth-century-BC Indian ascetic Sanjaya, whose approach of giving negative answers to all questions while holding no view of his own was rebuked by the early Buddhists (Raju 1954, 694). In this dialogue, Krishnamurti not only proves that his negation has a positive end, but also establishes negation as his pathless path [7]. In light of this, it is clear that the criticism made by the Indian saint Ānandamayī Mā (1896–1982) that “[note: Krishnamurti] has one fault: while his way is certainly valid he does not accept the validity of approaches other than his own” (Anandamayi Ma 2020) is rooted in a misunderstanding: he could not have accepted other
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